2024-09-04 15:46:15
The criminal investigation of Martin Winterkorn, who led the Volkswagen government from 2007 to 2015 before resigning after the outbreak of the “dieselgate” scandal, began this Tuesday. The former head of the European car giant, who is 77 years old, is mainly accused of “organized gang fraud”. In September 2015, Volkswagen admitted that it produced 11 million cars to show much lower levels of nitrogen gas emissions than they actually did. He faces 10 years in prison before a court in Brunswick, in the north of the country, not far from the manufacturer’s historic headquarters in Wolfsburg.
Recently called to testify in another civil trial against Volkswagen, he appeared weak on the fourth and final day of his hearing, according to a lawyer present.
The question is whether it can sustain the pace of long-term testing with plans set until mid-2025? He will have to travel to Brunswick twice a week, from his home in Munich, Bavaria. Its trial, originally scheduled for the fall of 2021 with four former directors, has been postponed and divided due to the fragile state of health of Martin Winterkorn after several surgeries.
False testimony
An engineer by training, Martin Winterkon has put the group on the foundation during his management. With the brands VW, Audi, Skoda and Bentley, among others, the European manufacturer has 330,000 to more than 600,000 employees with sales growing from 6.2 to 10 million vehicles worldwide.
However, the judge accused Martin Winterkorn of allowing the sale of vehicles equipped with fake software, despite his knowledge of their existence. This affected nine million vehicles, with damage estimated at several hundreds of euros. The fraud allegations span from 2006 to 2015, but prosecutors have only used part of this time against the accusers.
He will also have to answer for false testimony before the parliamentary committee of investigation in 2017, when he said that he only learned of the existence of illegal materials in September 2015. Prosecutors said that for him earlier that year.
Finally, it has been accused of market manipulation: once engine fraud was discovered in the United States in the summer of 2015, Volkswagen threatened large fines and a fall in the price of its product. However, investors were not notified until September 22 of the same year, after the scandal broke.
The central point of the trial will be to determine when exactly Martin Winterkorn became aware of the great deception and how he managed this information.
A fraud that cost 30 billion euros
Among the expected witnesses are Hans Dieter Pötsch, former chief financial officer of Volkswagen, and Herbert Diess, who arrived in July 2015 to head the VW brand. These two leaders avoided criminal investigation in 2020 thanks to a financial agreement of 9 million euros with the courts. The Volkswagen Group, for its part, is “not involved in the lawsuit,” a spokesman for the group said.
Since 2015, the Wolfsburg club has had to pay around 30 billion euros in compensations, compensation and legal costs, mainly in the United States where the club has been accused of wrongdoing and obstruction of justice.
The only Volkswagen executive tried to date, former Audi CEO Rupert Stadler was sentenced in June 2023 in Munich to a suspended prison sentence and a fine of 1.1 million euros. During his trial, he pleaded guilty to not preventing the sale of Premium brand vehicles despite his knowledge of the fraudulent software installed there.
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